Knit touchpad

[Plusea] made her own touchpad using some anti-static gloves and an Arduino. This proof of concept is fairly small, but the system could be scaled quite large if you could find the fabric. She cut apart the anti-static glove, mounted it and wired it to the Arduino. A special piece is made to fit over the finger that is also wired to the Arduino. The location of where she touches is determined by the resistance between the finger and each corner. Watch the video on the instructable to see how it measures.

She mentions that there are a few different ways to build it, some which would not require anything on your finger, but would use another piece mounted behind the touchpad. The method she is currently using though, would allow for the fabrick to be any size or shape, even molded around something.

Multitouch would definitely be possible, but you’d probably want to break up the update intervals and only read one value at a time. Not sure how that would work with the other fingers still attached, but I’m sure it’s possible.
This a very cool concept but I can see that reliability of the material might be a little questionable. Depends on the application I supppose

Multitouch could be done by having two or more fingers with separate wires to them where it could switch which finger is connected and poll them separately. I think it may also be possible to have isolated circuits which only share the path from their own finger to the corners. I may be corrected on that one, but if they both have isolated voltage sources, I think you can do it.

I have a bunch of old powermac G4 trackpads that i havnt been able to re-pupose yet, havnt dove into that synaptics stuff explaining how to interface them… anyone have some tips? titaniumexposeATgmailDOTcom

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But seriously, amazing post and thanks alot !
I look ahead to your next post !
:)